


Blue

by BrujaBanter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blow Jobs, Blue Moon, Different Moons Affect Remus Differently, Established Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, Explicit Sexual Content, It's All Very Scientific, It's Disability Positive Tho, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Painter Sirius, Temporary Blindness, We All Know It Took Them A While, Well Like Amateur Painter Sirius, Wolfstar Games 2020, You Will Quickly Discover I Know Nothing About Painting, bc Astronomy, blind Remus, but i tried, kind of, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27626822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrujaBanter/pseuds/BrujaBanter
Summary: In October of their sixth year, the weather changes, Sirius paints (another) moonscape, and Remus goes blind.ORThe effects of rare moons on werewolves, and the benefits therein.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 81
Collections: Wolfstar Games 2020





	Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, gorgeous readers!!
> 
> Coming at you with a oneshot less than 6,000 words long. I know, it's weird for me too. But this one got away from me a bit, and I desperately wanted to be a part of Wolfstar Games 2020, so it's admittedly a wee bit half-baked.
> 
> I'll stop disparaging it and let you decide. This is a little, mostly sweet story about how our boys navigate a Blue Moon. My Prompt was the song [Paint Your Pretty Picture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y2rmfmqegA) by Bill Withers, and my team was Sight (hi, pals!). Enjoy the thing, and PLEASE take care of your sweet selves.
> 
> P.S. Ace/smut-averse pals, skip the final scene to avoid the sexin'.

**Le Pomme**

Arthur Crownwell looked like a potato with eyes, and every time Sirius said that, it made Regulus giggle. He was not an especially large man, but his giant red face gave the illusion that he had no shape at all. He spat when he spoke, little droplets that landed in their oil paints and left little wells of giant-red-face spit, and it reminded Regulus of the castoff of juice when you first bite into a big, red apple. So they started calling him “le pomme” and the maddeningly distracted art tutor never noticed.

A month before Sirius’s was to leave home for his first year at Hogwarts, Regulus became increasingly withdrawn. He knew – they both did, really – that nothing was going to be the same after that. “Don’t worry, Reg, we’ll both be in Slytherin,” Sirius tried to reassure him, all the while hoping against hope to avoid the curse of the silver and green. “And I’ll be home for the winter holidays. It’ll be like I never left.”

Regulus smiled and nodded and didn’t believe him.

They started spending more time together in the small parlour towards the back of the house, the one with all the furniture covered in opaque white tarps to remind them both that no one truly expected them to be able to keep the paint on the canvas. They compared finished products and teased the defenseless _le pomme_ and talked about which position they’d each play on the Slytherin Quidditch team. Regulus was the better of the two, could make his fruit bowls look like fruit bowls and his silhouettes look like silhouettes, but Sirius thought there was a certain aplomb to the way his colors always ran together or his lines always ended up just a little bit squiggly. Arthur told him his work was “abstract”, while Walburga told him his work was “primitive”. Still, he pretended not to notice when Regulus packed a set of acrylic paints and brushes into his trunk, and pledged to himself that he’d paint his brother something every now and then, just to remind Regulus he hadn’t forgotten about him.

That’s how Sirius Black began painting the moon.

He hid it from his new mates at first, thinking painting feminine and dainty and terrible upper class. But then Remus caught him one day, covered in blue and white paint and frustratedly trying to get the shading on his latest moonscape to look less clunky. Remus just stared, amazement and confusion and a terror Sirius didn’t understand yet.

“Where did you learn to paint so well?” A blushing, eleven-year-old Remus asked his new friend.

Sirius blushed back, red, _le pomme_ , and shrugged and said “all purebloods learn” and grew ten feet inside, because Remus Lupin thought he painted well.

“Can I watch?” Remus asked, his eyes never leaving the canvas.

“Oh! Erm…y-yeah. Sure.” Sirius replied, trying desperately to sound nonplussed.

They existed in complete silence for hours, Sirius painting and Remus watching and neither feeling like they needed to fill the space with anything other than the squelching of the wet brush against the palette or the tiny _hmm_ ing sounds Sirius didn’t know he made when he considered his work. When Sirius finished, he realized with a self-conscious startle that he’d painted something real, something he meant to paint. Remus said, “It’s beautiful, Sirius” without an ounce of insincerity, with a genuine appreciation for the witnessing of creation, so Sirius didn’t send that particular painting home. He gave it to Remus, and the smile that crept across Remus’s young face was shiny and fresh, like an apple.

And that’s how Sirius Black began painting Remus Lupin.

**The Effect of Certain Moons on Lycanthropes**

That year, their sixth at Hogwarts, it wasn’t until October that the weather got cold enough to see through the window. You know the way. That first day in autumn, before the leaves have started changing colors, when you can look through a window and see that the air is crisper. You can’t name how you know, or why, you just do. You just know you’ll walk out the door that day and regret you didn’t bring a jumper. You’ll regret not trusting your intuition, because you’ll say “but the leaves hadn’t changed yet” and “it was just hot enough to swim a few days ago” and there will be nothing you can point to, no piece of evidence, except that you saw it through the window.

Muggles have magic, too. They just don’t realize it. 

That October, Sirius painted the first day of autumn, the kind you could see through the window. And that October, there were two full moons in one month. A Blue Moon, the Muggles call it, although they don’t really understand why and they don’t really understand its significance. They’ve written songs about it, painted paintings, taken photographs hoping to capture something special. But they have to name it in the song, or the painting, or the photograph, because you can’t see a blue moon without explanation. Not like the first real day of autumn. Sirius managed to capture that too, though not in the way he intended.

Anyway, that was the first time Remus went blind.

“That’s not it, actually,” Peter said, chewing on a jagged thumbnail. “Technically, it’s when there’s four full moons in a single season, not two in a single month.”

James smirked at him and raised a fifth bottle of Butterbeer to his lips. Remus wasn’t paying attention anyway, lost in thought behind some obscure novel by some obscure author. Sirius threw a bottle cap at Peter’s face, and missed by several inches.

“Eh, mate, who cares?” Sirius said. “It’s cause for celebration either way!”

“You think everything’s cause for celebration!” Peter protested, picking up the errant bottle cap and throwing it back in Sirius’s direction, hitting him right above his left eye.

“Now, now, boys,” James said, twirling his wand in his fingers seamlessly. “The real question is,” he trained his eyes on Remus, all mischief and wonder, “what happens to our boy Moony, here, on this so called _Blue Moon_?”

All three boys turned their attention toward Remus, who might as well already have been blind for how oblivious he was to their gaze. Sirius picked up the bottle cap and threw it at Remus, who blinked up at them as if coming out of a trance.

“Huh?” He asked, shaking a bit of curly hair out of his face. He was desperately in need of a haircut, not that anyone had noticed.

“Hasn’t heard a damn thing we’ve said, the twat,” Sirius said to no one in particular, taking another long sip of his Butterbeer.

“What did you say?” Remus asked.

“I _said_ ,” James replied, nudging Remus playfully on the shoulder with his socked toe, “What happens to you on a Blue Moon?”

Peter was probably the only one who picked up on the tiny tick, the nearly imperceptible jerk of Remus left shoulder that betrayed a discomfort he would never voice aloud. Not to them. Not to the only people who ever asked such questions so easily. But it happened every time someone brought up his condition.

Remus shrugged and made a noncommittal sound before returning to his book.

“You don’t _know_?” James said, needling him as only James Potter could. Fully intrusive and incredibly nosy and still fully affectionate besides. “How could you not know?”

“Maybe nothing happens,” Peter chimed in, coming to Remus’s defense in whatever small way he could manage. “Maybe it’s just like any other full moon.”

“Can’t be,” Sirius said. He was now lying on the common room rug with his legs propped up against the arm of the sofa. A completely full bottle of Butterbeer (his fifth now, too) was perched precariously on his chest. “Professor Cygnus said Blue Moons change the entire atmosphere. Make everything more powerful.”

Remus glanced at Sirius over the rim of his reading glasses. “You…you paid attention in astrology?”

“Had to, didn’t I?” Sirius responded, “Ever since Leona Lourdes said our astrological signs are going to match up in Jupiter or something. No idea what it means, but she made it sound like we might…” Sirius made a crude and sexually graphic hand gesture.

“So what does that mean, Galileo?” James asked Sirius sarcastically, slingshotting another bottle cap at the Butterbeer on Sirius’s chest with all the precision of Gryffindor’s star Quidditch player. The bottle flipped backwards off Sirius, who caught it gracefully with the quick hands of Gryffindor’s star pickpocket. “Moony will be able to lift a Hippogriff over his head?”

“No, you _plebeian_. It’s more complex than that. It has to do with _energy_.”

“Sooooo Moony will be able to run around the Black Lake repeatedly without getting tired?”

Sirius made a show of sighing and moving to a seated position as if it was the biggest imposition in the world. “Not that kind of energy, Jamesie, you sweet, simple idiot. The energy of the _universe_. It’s very metaphysical, I wouldn’t expect you two dimwits to understand.” (Sirius didn’t motion directly to Peter, but Peter knew he was one of the intended “two” anyway). “Remus, on the other hand…”

As if in slow motion, three sets of eyes descended on Remus, who was doing a half-arsed job of pretending not to hear them and staring very hard at the same sentence he’d been rereading for several minutes now.

“Oh, _fine._ ” Remus said, closing his book defeatedly. He turned to Peter, “It’s not just like any other moon,” and to James, “I cannot in fact lift a Hippogriff over my head,” and finally to Sirius, “and Leona Lourdes is never going to look at you twice unless you grow a rather substantial set of breasts. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to read.”

He stood up from the sofa and ascended the steps to their dorm room, leaving James to contemplate what indeed does happen to werewolves on a blue moon and Sirius to contemplate rather substantial sets of breasts.

\- * -

Remus had just made it back to their dorm room and settled into his bed to continue reading when he fell asleep. By the time he woke up, night had fallen, and Sirius was creeping into their room with uncharacteristic caution.

“Mate?” Sirius was standing a little sheepishly, holding a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses out to Remus.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Since when do you need reading glasses anyway?” Sirius said, perching himself on the edge of Remus’s bed. Remus tried to hide the flush rising up his cheeks at Sirius’s proximity.

He shrugged. “Couldn’t quite see right today, vision was a little blurry. Peter had these lying around.”

“Oh,” Sirius said, the faint edges of something like concern lining his voice. “Are…are you okay? Do you need to see Madam Pomfrey?”

“It’s just a migraine, Padfoot. No need to push me onto the fainting couch at every sign of ailment.” His voice was a bit sharper than he intended and he knew Sirius could hear it too.

There was a lot between them now, more than concern about vision and special moons. They’d hooked up exactly three and a half times (the half being because Peter walked in and almost caught them) since the first time at James’s place over the summer, and neither one of them had brought it up afterwards. They weren’t dating – that much was clear – but they were… _something_. They had to be _something_. Because every time Sirius entered the room, the very molecules shifted, and the overwhelming scent of him and the feel of him and the sheer power of him took over Remus’s head like a vice grip. And Sirius felt it too. At least, he hoped Sirius felt it too.

“Right,” Sirius said, defeated. “Right. Well I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Remus almost called Sirius’s name, apologized and asked him to stay and told him that he was a little weirded out by the blurred vision too, actually. But he didn’t. He fell back asleep almost as soon as the bedroom door closed behind Sirius. By the next morning, a migraine was the least of his worries.

\- * -

When Remus awoke the next day, all he could see were colors. They moved in fuzzy-edged blobs and only ever came into focus enough for him to barely make out some sense of depth. _Navy blue blob_ : _two meters away,_ he told himself as he walked precariously through the school hallways, a pair of sunglasses perched atop the bridge of his nose. _Moving blobs of crimson and gold_ : _five meters._ _Black blob: one meter…no, closer…it’s moving rather quickly now, right in front of–_

“Moony!” The voice of James Potter mere centimeters away overtook all his senses. “Why didn’t you tell me you were bloody blind!”

Remus looked in his general direction, suddenly very thankful for the sunglasses, and put on his most normal sounding voice. “What are you on about, Prongs? I’m _fine_.”

“Oh yeah? How many fingers am I holding up, then?”

Remus squinted behind his glasses, trying desperately to make out more than splotches of colors which, if he was honest, were starting to appear more in various shades of gray now.

“Two,” He said confidently, hoping James was merely holding up his signature peace sign.

“Haven’t even raised my hand yet.”

_Damn._

“How could you tell?!”

“You kidding?” James asked, chuckling. “You walked right out of the Great Hall after lunch without so much as glancing at the chocolate pudding.”

“I did n…wait, pudding?”

“Don’t worry, I saved you some.” The voice of Sirius Black cut through the gray and Remus immediately turned his head in its direction.

“Sirius? When did you get here?”

“Blimey, mate, you can’t even see Padfoot?” James asked. Remus conceded, and merely shook his head. “We’re going straight to Madam Pomfrey.”

Each boy grabbed one of Remus’s elbows and together they practically dragged him to the hospital wing, where Madam Pomfrey looked him over thoroughly and then merely stared at him, flummoxed.

“Boys, I’ll be honest,” She said with her signature frankness. “I haven’t a clue what’s causing this.”

“It’s the moon,” Sirius cut in. All three turned to him (a rather futile gesture on the part of Remus, who at this point couldn’t see much of anything at all).

“Mr. Black,” Madam Pomfrey said sharply, “Mr. Lupin has experienced several full moons while under my tutelage, and never once has he–”

“It’s the Blue Moon,” Sirius spoke over her. “It’s affecting him differently. Has been since the waxing gibbous.”

“Sirius, I’ve been fi–”

“Three days ago, you started squinting at the blackboard during Charms. By dinner, you were having trouble with depth perception – kept nearly stabbing Peter’s hand instead of your roast. In Potions the next day, you asked Lily to read the instructions – which you’ve only ever done twice, because you know she’s better than you at adding the ingredients – and then yesterday with the reading glasses, and even then you could barely make out the words. You didn’t finish a single chapter of ‘Dorian Gray’, and I know it’s your favorite.”

All three stared at him, dumbfounded. Sirius blushed beat red, but held his ground.

“What the bloody hell is a ‘waxing gibbous’?” James finally asked.

“Fourth stage of the lunar cycle,” Remus and Sirius said at exactly the same time, neither taking their gaze off each other.

“But…” Remus began, a thousand different thoughts and emotions clouding his brain, “but I’ve been through Blue Moons before, Pads, and I’ve never…”

“I can’t figure that part out, either,” Sirius responded, shaking his head in a way that suggested he was truly troubled by this admission. “I’ve tried looking, in the Restricted Section even, but there just isn’t that much to find on–”

“I can answer that,” Madam Pomfrey chimed in loudly, obviously happy to be the authority once again. “Recent research has suggested different neural processing on pre-versus-post-pubescent lycanthropes.” Sirius, James, and Remus all looked at Madam Pomfrey as if she had just spoken to them in German. “You are a young man now, Remus,” She tried again. “Before, you were merely a child.”

There wasn’t time for Remus to feel embarrassed at the frank discussion of his adolescent development. He was too preoccupied with other thoughts.

“Is it going to go away?” Remus asked, not wanting to consider the ramifications of living the rest of his life not only as a werewolf, but as a blind werewolf.

“I’d assume so,” Madam Pomfrey responded, a hint of sympathy in her voice, “Otherwise all werewolves would be permanently blind. We just have to ensure you make it through this full moon safely, until your vision returns to normal.”

Remus nodded, hoping she was right, and didn’t protest when she insisted on making a detailed plan with him for the night’s full moon. Oblivious to the fact that Remus actually spent his full moons traipsing through the Forbidden Forrest with his three best friends – all of whom were unregistered anamagi – Remus conceded to let her bind him, concerned the blindness would make the wolf fearful and more likely to try to rip through itself. Sirius objected, loudly, but Remus knew she was right, and could hardly reassure her without revealing their secret.

“It doesn’t make sense for you to come this time,” Remus said under his breath that night at supper. “It’s not like I can leave the shack anyway.”

“No way,” Sirius responded immediately. “We’re coming, and that’s final.”

“Remush hash got a point,” James said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “We won’t really be able to help.”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed. “Besides, we have that History of Magic exam tomorrow, and Professor Binns is one low grade away from failing me entirely.”

“I can’t believe you two!” Sirius shouted, and was immediately shushed by all three of them. “We’re a _pack_! We can’t just abandon Moony just because he’s…”

“Blind as a bat?” Peter supplied.

“Couldn’t find his own cock if it was glued to his hand?” James chimed in.

“It’s not _funny_!” Sirius shouted, and the words sounded strange coming from a boy who was once banned from his own grandfather’s funeral for laughing so incessantly it drowned out the priest. “Remus _needs us_ now and you’re both just going to…well piss off, then!” This time no one tried to shush him, nor would it have mattered, for he was out of his seat and storming out of the Great Hall before any of them could say anything.

“Eh, mate,” James said to Remus a few moments later. “You know we’re here for you. It’s just…we won’t be able to…”

“I’m the one who suggested it, James,” Remus responded, rather more shortly than he’d intended. “It’s fine. Now would one of you mind escorting me to the hospital wing? It’ll be dark soon.”

Hesitantly, Peter rounded the table and offered Remus his elbow. Remus took it, but couldn’t help but wish it was Sirius’s instead.

\- * -

The chains reminded him of home, but not in a good way. They reminded him of lonely, cold nights chained in a shed by parents who didn’t know better and had never faced worse. Pomfrey tried to charm the restraints as soft as possible, but by her own admission charms weren’t her strong suit, so they cut into his wrists deeper and deeper as the moon approached, as his skin became more sensitive to every touch. All he could see now was blackness, and all he wanted – damn it all to hell – was Sirius.

He thought he must have finally gone completely insane, because as the moon approached, he could have _sworn_ he heard the distinctive pitter-patter of Padfoot’s paws approach too. With the blindness, his already heightened senses were further elevated, and he wondered if it was possible that he was picking up the sounds of a transformed Sirius pacing back and forth in their dorm room, several hundred meters away.

“Moony!” Remus turned so quickly towards the sound he nearly decapitated himself, momentarily forgetting he was restrained. “It’s only me.”

“Blimey, Sirius,” Remus croaked back, his heart pounding in his chest. “Announce yourself, I could have stunned you into oblivion.”

“You don’t have your wand,” Sirius retorted. “And besides, your tied up with…fuck, what is that, _chain_? Pomfrey couldn’t find anything a bit more gentle?”

“Like what, Pads, organza? I’d bite right through anything else.”

Sirius didn’t respond, though Remus could hear him circling Remus’s chained body, inspecting the configuration of steel trappings. It made Remus feel very exposed, completely vulnerable, and more than a little turned on. He readjusted himself to hide the erection that popped up very suddenly.

“What are you doing here?” He asked.

“I wasn’t about to let you chew through your own skin out here all by yourself, Moony.”

Remus’s heart jumped in a way that had nothing to do with the moon. “But I thought we agreed–”

“They agreed. James and Peter. Fuck those wankers, I’m not leaving you alone.”

It was Remus who’d gone blind, not Sirius, so the only hope Remus had of Sirius not picking up on his wide, dumb grin is if it was dark enough now for him to not see it.

“Isn’t there something we can do to make these chains less…chain-like?”

Sirius’s voice was coming from below him now, and he could tell Sirius was crouched down in front of him. Close, very close. Right near…

“Pomfrey tried. It’s fine. Listen, Sirius, you have to _promise_ –”

“I’ll stay in the corner the whole time. I won’t transform out of Padfoot. I’ll leave at the first sign of trouble.” Sirius recited the rules like a homework assignment.

“Promise me,” Remus said, not smiling anymore.

“Remus,” Sirius said, and then, very close to Remus’s face, “I promise.”

And he was blind, completely now, and the moon was close, and it was stronger than ever, and he was scared and cold and tied in a shack. But he could have sworn, just in the final second before he succumbed to the blinding pain that meant he wouldn’t remember much from now on, that he felt Sirius kiss him on the forehead.

**The After-Effects of Certain Moons on Lycanthropes (And Their Lovers)**

When Remus came to, the room was dark. He blinked his eyes a few times, tried to ignore the stabbing pain in his lower back, and briefly wondered why he’d woken up before the sun had come up, until he realized.

“I’m still blind,” He said to himself. His voice was weaker than usual, hoarser, and he wondered just how much of the night he spent howling. He flinched when he felt warm hands beginning to run over the part of his lower back that hurt so much.

“I was wondering,” A voice said. Sirius. Sirius said. Sirius was still there. “Towards the end there, it started to seem like maybe you could…but no matter. Madam Pomfrey said it was temporary.”

“How long have you been here?” Remus asked, more a self-deprecating habit than a genuine question.

“Long as you have, genius. Now roll over, onto your front.”

For whatever reason, he didn’t protest, didn’t insist he could take care of it later himself. Sirius went to work anointing Remus’s wound in healing salve, and the soothing relief made him shut his eyes again.

“How did I get this one?” He asked Sirius.

“Oh. Well, erm, it was kind of…my fault, actually.”

“Your fault? How?”

Sirius paused for a long moment. “Well, you got a bit…you just seemed so…I don’t think you liked not being able to see, it made you a bit, erm, paranoid. Every little sound made you jump, and then it started to rain, and you got a bit overwhelmed. So I thought – if I could just get a bit closer…”

Remus turned onto his side, injuries be damned. “Sirius, you didn’t.”

“It’s fine, Moony, really. You could hear me, getting closer, and you got…excited. You tried to get loose, and the chains cut you. Not entirely sure how, exactly, but you wouldn’t let me look while you were still…you know.”

“Sirius.”

“I know, I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. I could have hurt you.”

“ _Sirius._ ”

“What?”

“Are you okay?” His voice quivered. “I can’t see, Pads, I can’t tell if–”

“I’m fine, Moony. Honest.”

“Let me feel.”

What made him say it was the blindness. It was the heightened senses, and the unmistakable smell of blood. It was the way he couldn’t tell where his body was, what it looked like, the need to know the blood was only his own.

What made Sirius let him was something else altogether.

It was very silent – even to a boy with heightened hearing – as Sirius leaned back on his ankles and removed his shirt, button by button, and discarded it somewhere behind him. He grabbed Remus’s left hand, big and warm and spotted with blood, and brought it to his chest. Remus raised himself into a seated position, flinching a little from the kinds of pains he was used to by now, and brought his right hand to meet his left. He could feel Sirius’s heartbeat below his palms, and it wasn’t checking his skin for cuts but it was reassurance of the pumping of blood, so he kept them there for a while. His eyes were open even as they were unseeing, and they looked straight, at Sirius but not at Sirius at all.

“Kiss me, Moony.”

What made him say it was the blindness. The eyes, that looked at him and not at him, the desire to put his face so close to Remus’s that his eyes shut all on their own, instinct taking over and telling him there is no need to see, only to feel and taste and touch.

Remus brought his face closer to Sirius, granting permission but not knowing where to place his lips, so Sirius closed the distance between them. He breathed through his nose at the touch of his lips on Remus’s, and let Remus continue to roam his torso with his hands.

Sirius smelled dirty, like no sleep and no food and no shower, and it was delicious. He felt the warm, intact skin of every part of Sirius he could touch, and that was delicious too, so he kept his eyes closed and his lips attached to Sirius’s and let his hand wander lower. He fumbled over Sirius’s unnecessarily intricate belt buckle and, when his fingers couldn’t quite figure it out, opened his eyes to aid him and saw nothing. This was the closest to Sirius he’d ever felt, the most real and the most vulnerable, and he couldn’t see Sirius react to his hand around his cock, couldn’t get the affirmations of “this is okay, I want this too” from his eyes, and he was hungry and achy and tired and blind. He removed his hands from Sirius and brought his palms to his eyes, pressing, punishing them for their betrayal.

“Moony, hey,” Sirius was saying, grabbing Remus’s wrists with his hands and pulling them away from his face. “Hey, Moony. It’s okay.”

Remus wondered if his eyes still looked the same, same brown irises and slightly bloodshot whites. He wondered if they’d gone milky, like cataracts, or black, like his own vision. He shut them, shut them and slumped his shoulders and sighed. He could hear Sirius moving around him – the shuffle of limbs that meant he was getting to his feet and the zip of his leather jacket as he prepared to leave Remus alone, cold and blind – but then Sirius’s hands were on his shoulders, pushing him backwards. He went willingly, dropped onto his elbows and then onto his back, and felt the warm, silky material of something between his body and the floor.

“It’s okay,” Sirius said again. “Allow me.”

A few breaths, and then warm lips on his neck, and then hands at his own, less complicated belt. They fumbled for a bit, even though Sirius could see perfectly well, and then he was lifting his hips to allow Sirius to remove the trousers he couldn’t actually remember putting back on in the first place.

“Are you comfortable?” Sirius asked. It was such a simple question, and yet it clicked. Remus couldn’t see it happen, but he could feel it. He could feel Sirius trying to see for him, trying to imagine what every move and breath and inch of skin of a blind man felt like and, when he couldn’t be sure exactly, asking. He could smell Sirius, pheromones shifting from _sex_ to _care_ to _sex_ and back again. He could taste Sirius, when he pushed himself onto his elbows to lick into Sirius’s mouth, taste smoke and salt and a little bit of chocolate. He could hear it.

 _Click_.

“Please, Sirius.” It didn’t answer the question and it also did. “Please.”

“Lay back,” Sirius whispered, right into his ear.

Remus laid his head back on the silken barrier – he could smell it now, unmistakably the lining of Sirius’s leather jacket – and his thighs tensed when Sirius gripped each of them in his hands.

“Relax,” Sirius whispered, right above his cock, and then Sirius’s warm, wet tongue licked a delicious circle around the head. He gripped Remus’s thighs to keep them in place as an over-sensitized Remus simultaniously tried to thrust into the heat of Sirius’s mouth and move away from it. Something began to flash behind his eyes. Colorless fireworks, not so much flashes of light as little specks of not-darkness, appeared in his vision with every lick, every lurid slurp.

Up until now, they’d mostly given each other hand jobs, with the occasional dry humping thrown in the mix. So Remus wasn’t sure if it was the novelty of the experience or the blindness or the moon, but he could not keep a string of _fuckPadfootfuckplease_ from escaping his mouth. Sirius sucked eagerly, sucked like he’d done it a thousand times before (which, to Remus’s knowledge, he might have). He took breaks to lavish the head with attention it had never before been given, gluttonous little licks and kisses that Remus didn’t need to see to understand. Sirius enjoyed this. Sirius wanted this. Sirius wanted _him_.

Instinctually, Remus raised himself onto his elbows to look, see Sirius devouring him, before remembering that he could not in fact see anything at all. But as Sirius worked – slowly, meticulously – the specks of white turned brighter, not yet color but more than the absence of it. They began to form shapes, the fuzzy outlines of triangles and squares and circles, creating the illusion that Sirius was summoning them himself, was drawing the shapes into the skin of his cock and letting the love and pleasure and tenderness move them up Remus's spine and to his brain. 

Sirius pulled off and began lavishing every part of Remus he could reach in tender kisses and obscene swipes of his tongue and playful bites, his inner thigh and bollocks and hipbone. He was uncharacteristically silent aside from the occasional moan as he brought Remus closer and closer to climax.

“Sirius, Pads, I’m close,” Remus warned, probably sooner than he needed to, unsure of the proper etiquette.

Sirius only doubled down, moaned something that sounded like “yes” around Remus’s cock. With the encouragement, Remus climbed, higher and higher and closer and closer, a blissful ladder he could almost see in the slatted roof when he looked up at the ceiling. He heard a thudding sound and felt a dull ache and it took him a moment to realize it was his own head dropping back onto the cushion of Sirius’s jacket. A moment later he was coming, into Sirius’s mouth or hand or both at once, and maybe it was precisely because he couldn’t see clearly that everything else, for a moment, felt crystal clear.

Which is why, as Sirius kissed his way back up Remus’s torso and plopped down next to him with an utterly sated sigh, Remus shut his eyes tighter and said into the chilly, new-fall air, “I fucking love you.” And it’s why – when getting no immediate response – he repeated himself. “I love you I love you I love you I love you…”

He was cut off with a kiss. A long, gentle one that could have communicated “shut the hell up” or could have communicated “I love you back” and Remus was never going to know now because he was going to be blind forever.

“I made you something,” Sirius said, cheery and energetic and still very sated. “Got a bit bored, you know, while you were recovering and, well…”

Sirius had stood and moved to a wall on the far side of the room, on which a kind of mural had been painted. Various hues of blue came together to form an unmistakable moonscape, bracketed as if being viewed from behind by the silhouetted black forms of four different animals for whom the moon itself was irrelevant. Two of the animals – a wolf and a dog – stood close, the wolf laying its slightly disproportionate head on the shoulder of the dog.

“You’re so very literal,” Remus said through a wide grin. “’Blue Moons’ aren’t really blue, you know?”

“It was the only color I brought with me!” Sirius protested. “Besides, it’s–wait…”

Remus stood, walked over to Sirius and kissed him and recognized that “I love you, too” was drawn right into the painting, invisible to anyone but the two of them.

“It’s stunning, Sirius,” Remus said, quiet and genuine. “It’s…everything.”

The smile playing across Sirius’s face now was nearly incandescent, pure and wondrous and entirely unabashed. It was nearly obscene, just as well as it made Remus’s stomach flip.

“Oh, wipe that smug grin off your face, you wanker!” Remus said.

Sirius just smiled impossibly wider.

“What?”

“You can see me smiling, you idiot! You can see the painting!”

Maybe he hadn’t noticed because he hadn’t lost his vision for very long, hadn’t enough time to truly miss it. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed because of the chemicals flooding his brain – no sleep chemicals and pain chemicals and pleasure chemicals and orgasm chemicals.

Probably, it was the love. All clear and fresh autumn air and change and shades of blue. 

They were both starving now, the sounds of the faraway castle waking up reminding them the day was not so rare as the moon. It didn’t matter. Remus sat back down on Sirius’s jacket, crossing one ankle over the other and not feeling or caring if there were more wounds to tend to.

“Paint me another.”

\- Fin. 

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title is semi-obvious, but is also inspired by the song "Blue" by Aaron Taylor, which always reminds me of our boys. You can listen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWIzGEZX6Mo) and find his music [here](https://www.aaron-taylor.com).
> 
> *  
>  **Mod Note**
> 
> Please vote on this work! [VOTING FORM](https://forms.gle/bqvGUxxkHhkxQJKA8)


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